Education
Pisa study: German students worse than ever
German students performed worse than ever before in the new PISA study. photo
© picture alliance / Jens Büttner/dpa
Young people in Germany receive the lowest scores in mathematics, reading and science that have ever been measured for Germany as part of Pisa. The reasons are complex.
The German students have achieved success in the international performance study Pisa will perform worse in 2022 than ever before. In reading as well as in mathematics and natural sciences, these are the lowest values ever measured for Germany as part of Pisa. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Berlin announced that average performance has also fallen drastically internationally. It is the first Pisa report card since the corona pandemic.
German students suffered particularly badly in mathematics. They achieved a score of 475, compared to 500 in the previous study published in 2019. They achieved 480 in reading (2019: 498) and 492 in science (2019: 503).
There was already a “Pisa shock”
Pisa stands for “Program for International Student Assessment” and is the largest international school performance comparison study. The skills of 15-year-old young people in reading, mathematics and natural sciences are recorded. Since 2000 it has been carried out every three years.
The first comparative study caused the “Pisa shock”: German 15-year-olds performed extremely poorly, and there was also a shamefully close connection between social background and educational opportunities in the Pisa report card. The result was a heated debate about education. Afterwards, the results improved significantly, but in the last rounds of Pisa there was a downward trend.
Unprecedented drop in performance
In the current survey, Germany is still close to the OECD average in international comparison in the areas of mathematics and reading skills and above the OECD average in natural sciences, but that is no reason to breathe a sigh of relief. According to the experts, it is not just the situation in Germany that is worrying: there has been an unprecedented drop in performance in this cycle, the report said. “Compared to 2018, average performance in OECD countries fell by 10 points in reading and almost 15 points in mathematics.” The latter is almost three times as many as all successive changes.
According to the OECD, this decline is particularly pronounced in a handful of countries – including Germany. For example, Poland, Norway, Iceland and Germany recorded a decline of 25 or more points in mathematics between 2018 and 2022. “The dramatic decline in math and reading scores suggests a negative shock affecting many countries simultaneously,” the paper says.
Corona and language skills
The authors of the study see the reasons for the poor performance of German students as being, among other things, the corona pandemic. The results show that school closures had a negative effect on skill acquisition. In Germany, distance learning was done less with digital media and more with materials sent to young people than the OECD average.
Another possible factor for the results is a lack of language skills. “A central reason is certainly that we have still not managed to consistently ensure early language support for everyone who needs it,” said study leader Doris Lewalter, educational researcher at the Technical University of Munich and chairwoman of the Center for International Comparative Education Studies . “If we have students with an immigrant background, we cannot assume that they will already have mastered the German educational language when they come to Germany.”
The study points out that very few OECD countries were able to improve parts of their results between 2018 and 2022, for example Japan in reading and science and Italy, Ireland and Latvia in science.